We face one of the greatest challenges in the history of humanity, to eliminate the fuels that have driven progress and technology for over a century, while our thirst for energy only grows. The sun is the biggest source of energy in the solar system. It's like a nuclear reactor in the sky, and it provides endless power. If we can harvest just fractions of this, it can power all our consumption. Innovators are searching for new ways to capture more of the sun’s power, and make it available through the night, everywhere.
'2040' is an innovative feature documentary that looks to the future, but is vitally important now. Award-winning director Damon Gameau embarks on journey to explore what the future would look like by the year 2040 if we simply embraced the best solutions already available to us to improve our planet and shifted them into the mainstream. Structured as a visual letter to his 4-year-old daughter, Damon blends traditional documentary footage with dramatized sequences and high-end visual effects to create a vision board for his daughter and the planet.
Dr George McGavin and Dr Zoe Laughlin set up base camp at one of the UK's biggest sewage works to investigate the revolutionary science finding vital renewable resources and undiscovered life in human waste. Teaming up with world-class scientists, they search for biological entities in sewage with potentially lifesaving medical properties, find out how pee can generate electricity, how gas from poo can fuel a car and how nutrients in waste can help solve the soil crisis. They follow each stage of the sewage treatment process, revealing what the stuff we flush can tell us about how we live today, and the mind boggling biotechnology being harnessed to clean it, making the wastewater safe enough to return to the environment.
It is the greatest technological challenge ever undertaken by humankind. The quest to produce the ultimate energy solution, Fusion, a reliable source of clean power. What if we could create here on earth, our very own version of a star, a machine that makes power from nuclear fuel? But so immense are the challenges, the goal of a power-producing fusion reactor has so far remained elusive and out of reach... until now.
Are rising temperatures driving Earth's ecosystems past a point of no return? We have promising technologies that put solutions within our grasp. Scientists are exploring solutions: from geoengineering to sucking carbon out of the air to cloud brightening, as means to cool the planet. Cutting-edge solutions and high-risk measures. But would they work? And what are the risks of engineering Earth's climate?
